1,431 entries categorized "Hispanic Market Size"

Donald Trump talked tough about building a wall along the Mexican border, but the Republican still won more than one-third of the Latino vote in Texas.

That's about the same percentage as supported a less-inflammatory GOP candidate, Mitt Romney, four years ago.

That strong Hispanic support for Trump and the GOP represents a "real problem for Democrats," said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.

And it shows how Democrats who've long hoped that a growing Hispanic population would turn Texas blue could be waiting a while.

“It’s a pretty big number, given the tone and rhetoric he used,” Rottinghaus said.

The Hispanic and Latino vote for Trump, which was estimated by exit polling, is weaker than the 44 percent who helped elect Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in 2014. But it's a reminder of the political diversity of more than 10 million people, living in a state of more than 27 million.

“It’s a very heterogenous population (that) includes people whose families have been here in Texas for 10 generations,” said Mark Jones, a Rice University political science professor. “Latinos may disagree with Donald Trump on immigration, but they may, on balance, consider him to be better when it confronting two suboptimal alternatives.”

For Martha Visney, who moved to the U.S. from Mexico and became a citizen after marrying an American in the '70s, Democrat Hillary Clinton's stance on abortion turned her off.

“We need a woman in the White House - just not her," said Visney, who has never voted for a Democrat.

The San Angelo Republican said she supports Trump’s plan for a border wall.

“It cost my husband a lot of money for me to come to this country legally,” she said. “If you want to come to this country, you have to abide by the United States of America law.”

Ofreal Galindo, 25, a Presidio metal-shop teacher, said abortion was a key issue.

“I’m basically on the side of the Republican Party because I’m pro-life,” Galindo said. “As the government sits right now, a 9 month-old baby doesn’t have any rights.”

Lionel Sosa, a longtime branding and media consultant in San Antonio, said he was surprised that Trump won as many votes among Texas Hispanic as he did, given the Republican's rhetoric about Mexicans being murderers and rapists.

“I thought he would get 20 percent to 22 percent,” Sosa said. “I thought Latinos were going to send him a huge message."

But Tuesday's returns show that many Latinos are just as disaffected as other Americans, he said, noting that party affiliation is not a strong predictor of their vote. When George W. Bush ran for governor the second time, he got 49 percent of the Latino vote.

"If a Republican does everything right, he’ll get half of the Latino vote," he said.

Ivan Gonzalez is one Texas Republican who didn’t vote for Trump.

“I didn’t believe him from the start,” said Gonzalez, 21, a Texas A&M student. “He changed his position all the time.”

But he didn’t vote for Clinton, either. Instead, he chose independent Evan McMullin.

“Knowing that the state was going to go Republican, I could afford a protest vote,” Gonzalez said.

Dalia Sanchez, the tax assessor and collector in San Patricio County, voted for Trump because of his business experience, and in spite of his rhetoric.

“I don’t like the way that he talks, but I respect the man for what he’s done,” she said. “He will run this country like a business.”

Sanchez feared the prospect of Clinton appointing justices who support abortion rights to the U.S. Supreme Court.

She also wants to see Obamacare repealed.

Sosa said the Latino turnout and vote, as with other demographic groups, depends on the candidates and issues at hand.

Rottinghaus said Clinton missed opportunities to gain the support of Texas Latinos. He surveyed 500 Latinos, ages 18 to 34, before the election.

“We found that for 79 percent, no party or political organization contacted them to register to vote,” he said. “Virtually none of them were contacted by a political organization. That’s a future issue.”

Harlingen immigration attorney Jodi Goodwin said the Trump victory is prompting calls from clients who want to know what to expect for Hispanics under a new administration. Goodwin said her clients heard his tough talk on immigration “loud and clear.”

“There is a lot of fear,” she said. “People are afraid there’ll be raids.”

Despite the fear, Jeff Betty, Republican chairman in Tom Green County, 90 miles south of Abilene, said he knew Trump would win Hispanic votes in Texas.

Betty helped distribute Trump yard signs -- about a third of which went to Hispanic voters, he said.

Texas voter registration records show from the 2012 general election to now, there are more than 500,000 additional registered voters with Hispanic last names.

The big question is how many of those Texans who registered to vote are going to vote in the general election.

David Villalobos, a community organizer for the Texas Organizing Project, said he didn’t vote in 2012. After hearing many other Latinos didn’t vote then, he said he wanted to do something about that and he became politically active.

“I feel like it’s in the best interest of our population to support Hillary Clinton where her stances are more aligned with our community and the protections she would offer not only the documented Latinos, but the undocumented as well,” said Villalobos.

Villalobos said he started convincing others to register to vote and then vote for Hillary Clinton.

On the other side of the political spectrum is businessman Vince Puente. Puente owns Southeast Office Systems in Fort Worth. He hosted a Mitt Romney campaign event four years ago.

“You got to go through the issues,” said Puente. “I don’t agree 100 percent with Trump. But he is way closer to the issues important to me than where Hillary Clinton is. Matter of fact, I can’t think of a single position that Hillary Clinton and I could agree on.”

The Latino vote may play a role in down ballot races for State Representative in Dallas County.

That may also impact the vote in states such as North Carolina, Nevada and Florida.

In an office suite not far from the airport, Irma Maldonado, 18, expertly role-played what she’d be doing on the city’s streets in half an hour: knocking on the doors of residents and exhorting them to vote. But not everything was a game. Before a group of young canvassers headed out for the day, a team leader at the community organizing group LUCHA mentioned that someone had earlier pulled a gun on two members of the team.

“Everything was OK,” the organizer said, but Maldonado and the 15 or so other teens and 20-somethings were given safety whistles before hitting the streets.

Maldonado has a personal stake in America’s immigration debate, which has been making headlines throughout the election, particularly because of Donald Trump’s description of Mexicans as rapists and his desire to have Mexico pay for a border wall.

“Before going into high school — it was the summer of 2012 — my mother decided to self-deport to Mexico” with her two youngest children, Maldonado said. Maldonado, who was born and grew up in New Mexico, had a hard time adjusting to life in Nayarit, Mexico, a small state on the Pacific coast north of Puerto Vallarta, especially given that she hadn’t known her family’s status. “I think it was right when we had to move when I actually realized that my mom wasn’t actually legal here in the United States, when I was 14 years old,” she said. Her father, who has a green card, continues to work in New Mexico; Maldonado now is a first-year nursing student and lives with her 23-year-old sister in Arizona. Her mother and brother remain in Mexico.

Mexican-Americans such as Maldonado may help determine the political future of Arizona — and the nation — in a landmark election year. In an August survey, respondents were asked if Trump and Clinton made their respective parties more welcoming or more hostile to Latinos. Nine percent of Mexican-Americans said Trump made the GOP more welcoming; 74 percent said he made it more hostile. By contrast, 59 percent said Clinton made the Democratic party more welcoming; 9 percent said more hostile. An October poll by Latino Decisions found that 17 percent of Latino voters nationwide said they support Trump or are leaning toward him; 70 percent supported Clinton.

In Arizona, a state long dominated by Republicans, Clinton and Trump are in a virtual tie, according to a Monmouth University Poll released last week. Latino voters, who make up a fifth of the state’s electorate, are supporting Clinton over Trump by 35 percentage points. And critical to the electoral vote, only 9 percent of Latino voters who support Trump are in battleground states. Overall, 13 percent of the eligible voters in battleground states are Latino.

Arizona “was this strong, powerful red,” said Pita Juarez, 29, the communications director for the One Arizona coalition, an umbrella group of 14 advocacy groups, including LUCHA, that is working to boost Latino voter turnout. “Just today, we saw on FiveThirtyEight … it’s a light blue. And that’s something that I thought, really, I would never see.” (Arizona has gone back and forth between light blue and light red in FiveThirtyEight’s forecast over the last few weeks. Currently, Trump has a slight edge in the state’s forecast.)

Gabriel Sanchez, a professor of political science at the University of New Mexico and a principal at the opinion research firm Latino Decisions, said Latinos are more enthusiastic about voting this year than in 2012, having been mobilized by Trump’s comments targeting Mexicans. He added that the Republican Party will have a hard time winning over Mexican-Americans in subsequent elections unless it supports comprehensive immigration reform.

Like black millennials, younger Latinos show much weaker enthusiasm for Clinton than their elders. According to the October GenForward survey, conducted over the first half of the month, 44 percent of Latinos ages 18-30 plan to vote for Clinton and 8 percent will vote for Trump, with 10 percent going to third-party candidates. Nineteen percent said they didn’t plan to vote, and 12 percent were undecided.

Mark Hugo Lopez, director of Hispanic research at the Pew Research Center, said that much of the growth in the Latino electorate in coming years will be from U.S.-born Latinos entering adulthood. Like other cohorts of younger voters they tend to be more supportive of bigger government, in contrast to older Mexican-Americans, who are more likely to hold conservative views. “Mexican-Americans are more likely to be Catholic than other groups of Latinos,” he said. “They are also more likely to be third or higher generation than other U.S. Latino groups and as a result to have served in the military. Both of these characteristics correlate with conservative views on many issues.” He noted that George W. Bush won at least 40 percent of the Latino vote in 2004.

Mexican-Americans constitute 63 percent of the 57 million U.S. Latinos. Some Mexican-Americans can trace their heritage in New Mexico and other regions later acquired as U.S. territory back to the 1600s and earlier, while others are recent immigrants. Of the 35.8 million people of Mexican descent in the U.S., 68 percent are native born, and more than a quarter of those born in Mexico have become U.S. citizens. Separate estimates from the Pew Research Center indicate there were 5.8 million unauthorized Mexican citizens in America in 2014, 52 percent of the total unauthorized immigrant population. The Census Bureau considers Latinos in the U.S. to be an ethnicity, not a race, and thus Latino respondents can also mark any or multiple races; about a quarter identify as Afro-Latino. But only 1 percent of the population of Mexico is Afro-Latino, according to a recent census in that nation, the first to count the category.2Nationwide, 11 percent of eligible voters are Latino, but in Arizona, 22 percent of eligible voters are. The state is currently going through a fierce local battle involving Sheriff Joe Arpaio that is arguably fanning the fires of Latino voter turnout as much as the national election.

Arpaio is an outsize figure who has served as Maricopa County sheriff for 23 years; run jails where the men must wear pink underwear and striped uniforms; and organized citizen border patrols with actor Steven Seagal. Arpaio also has a December court date on a contempt charge for violating a 2011 injunction against stopping people on the suspicion that they were not in the country legally. (He alleges the prosecution is politically motivated because of his support for Trump.) And just one week from now, Arpaio faces perhaps an even bigger challenge: a re-election bid with polls showing him trailing his challenger by 15 points.

LUCHA’s canvassers are campaigning against Arpaio, and there are indications that his presence on the ballot is motivating new voters. In Maricopa County, Democratic voter rolls rose by 13 percent since 2012, according to figures released in August, compared to a 7.6 percent increase for Republicans. And many Latinos register as independents but lean Democratic.

Some of the young activists who are canvassing for LUCHA are undocumented, according to One Arizona’s Juarez, and in other areas around the country with significant Latino populations, immigrants who are not yet on a path to citizenship are playing a role in the political process. One of them is Yessica Vasquez Moctezuma, 25, a bank teller, who will graduate this fall with a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has been in the United States for 19 years, which means she was undocumented until 2012, at which point an executive order qualified her for temporary but renewable DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status.

Vasquez Moctezuma is frank in her assessment of her family’s legal status, since her parents are not eligible for DACA and continue to work without documentation.

“We are breaking some laws just by being here illegally, but we bind to the laws here,” she said. “We pay our taxes every year, like any other citizen would.” She worries that her parents, who have paid into the Social Security system — which receives an estimated $12 billion a year from undocumented immigrants and their employers — will never receive benefits and will never be able to truly retire. Still, she said, “This is why I studied political science, because I love the government here. I feel like in so many ways it’s so great.”

For her part, Irma Maldonado said she is excited about voting in her first presidential election. After remaining undecided until early October, she decided to vote for Clinton. But she added, “Honestly, this election, a lot of people are not that pumped to vote. It’s really kind of sad.” The number of Mexican-American and Latino voters who show up on Nov. 8 could determine the outcome in her state, and possibly in the nation.

From a mostly white southern city devastated by the 1980s oil bust, Houston has transformed into a thriving international metropolis that in 2050 is projected to look more like El Paso, a predominantly Hispanic city on the Mexican border. An El Paso, that is, with Texas-sized shares of white, black and Asian residents.

It's the face of America's future - a stunning turnaround for a one-horse oil town built on a swamp by two New York City real estate promoters. Now the city is the bellwether for the nation as it navigates the challenges of its changing demographics years ahead of the rest of the country.

"We are in the midst of an epic transition. The United States throughout all of its history has been an amalgam of European nationalities but now it's rapidly becoming a microcosm of the world," said Stephen Klineberg, a Rice University sociology professor and founding director of its Kinder Institute for Urban Research. "That can be exhilarating and tremendous or it can tear us apart and become a major liability."

At the forefront of the nation's metamorphosis is Houston, with projections of America in 2050 looking somewhat like Harris County in 2010 and showing similar patterns. The white population in both will decline by as much as 23 percent, and the Hispanic population is set to increase by 14 percent nationally and 22 percent in the county.

By then, Houston will be 60 percent Hispanic, 15 percent white, 15 percent black and 10 percent Asian, according to projections by the Texas Demographic Center and Rice University's Hobby Center for The Study of Texas.

"Houston is really America on fast forward," said Bruce Katz, centennial scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, where he focuses on global urbanization. "The country is obviously moving in this direction but places like Houston are getting there first. It's going to affect everything. It's going to affect the economy, the education system at all levels, the politics. It already is."

For the last 15 years, Texas has led the country in both the number of people added to its population and its pace of growth. Between 2000 and 2015, the state gained 6.6 million residents compared to the far larger runner-up of California, which added 5.3 million people during that time.

The metropolitan region of Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land increased by almost 736,500 people in the last five years alone, more than any other in the nation and a growth of 12 percent. Assuming that rate continues until 2020, the area could have a population of 7.4 million. And if the migration from abroad and other states keeps at the same pace as during the last decade, the metro region could see a population of 14.4 million by 2050, more than double that of 2010, according to state projections.

The ripple effects of the 2015 oil crisis, however, means growth has slowed dramatically. The region had been creating a record average of 90,000 jobs a year since 2010, but that will now taper over the next several years, said Patrick Jankowski, senior vice president of research for the Greater Houston Partnership, an economic development organization.

That means migration is more likely to be at half of the boom-and-bust cycle of the last decade. When factoring that pace, the metro region is expected to have about 10.3 million residents by 2050, 5.4 million whom are Hispanic.

Migration is only half of the story. In the last five years, 18 percent of Harris County's net population gain was from elsewhere in Texas and the country and 30 percent from abroad. More than half, on the other hand, came from natural increase, or the rate of births minus deaths, according to the U.S. Census. Most of those are Hispanic babies, reflecting the growing trend in the rest of the country. Though the fertility rates of Latinas are on the decline, they still make up most of the nation's young child-bearing population.

Between 1990 and 2010, the share of the U.S. population made up of people of color went from 24 percent to 36 percent, and that is expected to grow to 44.5 percent by 2030, said William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution and author of "Diversity Explosion."

This is occurring as baby boomers are aging out of the workforce at record rates, with the working-age population in the United States expected to see a net loss of 15 million whites between 2010 and 2030.

Today, more than half of all Harris County residents younger than age 20 are Latinos. Whites only make up the majority of the demographic in the 65 or older age group.

"There's a decline in non-Hispanic white children," said Steve Murdock, a former Census Bureau director who heads Rice's Hobby Center. "Whether you look nationally or at the state or Houston, minority population growth is primarily the source of growth for the total population."

Klineberg of Rice's Kinder Institute said little can deter the furious march toward a predominantly Hispanic county with a diverse share of other ethnic and racial groups.

"The big point is that those numbers are probably baked in. This is a done deal," he said. "What isn't a done deal is how much these Latinos are prepared for leadership positions and making sure this diversity becomes a tremendous asset."

Houston's transformation began after the 1982 oil bust, one of the country's worst regional recessions, when one out of every seven jobs disappeared, Klineberg said, spurring a collapse in housing prices. As white oil workers moved elsewhere, Latino immigrants streamed in for blue-collar jobs. After the city's economy began to diversify with the expanding of the oil sector into petrochemicals and other related industries and the building of the Texas Medical Center, Overallskilled tech workers from Africa and Asia arrived.

Jobs lured them here, but what has helped keep them is the area's cheap housing prices, said Joel Kotkin, a fellow in urban studies at Chapman University in southern California.

"When housing prices are reasonable there's much more flexibility to absorb demographic changes," he said. "As long as Houston can manage to grow its economy and keep its housing costs relatively low, this increased diversity will still turn out to be reasonably good."

Sluggish economic growth and rising house prices, on the other hand, could land Houston in the same problems experienced by southern California, which is very diverse but has one of the nation's highest rates of income inequalityand low home ownership.

Angela Blanchard, president and CEO of Neighborhood Centers, Inc., which serves more than half a million people across Texas, said Houston has always drawn diverse migration because the city is built on the idea that anyone can come here and make it.

"People come to Houston with this idea that if they work hard they can get ahead. It's been a promise we can deliver upon that unites everyone, from a Cajun girl from Beaumont like me or someone from Bangalore," she said. "We're not a backward-looking city ... we look to our future. So many of us came from somewhere else."

Houston's housing policies and access to housing has meant that people from different backgrounds aren't driven into isolated neighborhoods as happens in some big cities.

"People move in and out of neighborhoods," Blanchard said.

She said diversity is important for cities because it helps them to participate fully in an increasingly globalized economy. Children in Houston schools speak Arabic and Urdu at home, for example, and Spanish and English at school.

"These will be global leaders," she said.

But Murdock from Rice's Hobby Center said city and state leaders need to invest more in improving educational opportunities for all children.

Just 10 percent of Hispanics in Houston who are 25 or older have a bachelor's degree compared to 18 percent of blacks and 53 percent of whites. The median household income for whites in the Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown area in 2010 was about $72,500 compared to just $41,000 for Hispanics and $39,600 for blacks.

"Education pays for everybody," Murdock said.

Without such investments, state demographer Lloyd Potter said the county, state and region could see increased rates of poverty and inequality.

"That potentially will be in our future if we don't make progress towards advancing educational attainment especially among young Latinos," he said. "When you look at 2050 and see what the labor force looks like, that's one of the more concerning things."

As Houston grows and its demographics change, there will also be a transformation of its geographic layout, said Jankowski of the Greater Houston Partnership. Employment centers will migrate to the suburbs as people of all backgrounds move further out for affordable housing. Think more of The Woodlands, the Energy Corridor, and suburban business centers like Fort Bend County.

The city will also continue to move away from its energy dependence and become a global trading center, he said. Key to that, however, is its diversity.

"It helps fuel creativity, whether you're standing in front of an easel or sitting on a bench in a lab," he said.

The Clinton campaign is reporting an "unprecedented" 133,000 Latinos have cast early ballots ahead of the November 8 election - a 99 percent increase in Latino voters compared to 2012, BuzzFeed News reported. The 133,000 votes consist of vote-by-mail and absentee ballots.

Early voting in Florida began Monday.

The Clinton campaign calls it a promising sign for the Democratic nominee as Latinos comprise 17% of the electorate in the swing state.

A survey taken the week of Oct. 17 to Oct. 24 by the National Association of Latino Elected Officials showed that nearly 75% of Latinos surveyed in Florida indicated they would likely vote for Clinton.

Clinton recently began a push to bolster her prospects in states like Texas and Arizona, which have traditionally voted for Republican candidates, and it appears to be working.

In a poll from the Arizona Republic, Clinton had a 39% to 33.9% advantage over Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, in the state that went to Bill Clinton in 1996 and hadn't granted a victory to a Democrat before him since 1948.

Trump does not seem to be attracting Latino voters as well as his Democratic opponent.

An NBC News/Wall Street poll published last week showed Clinton had garnered nearly 70% support from Latinos nationally in a four-way match-up, with Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein, while Trump trailed her with 17%.

--1.8 percent of the eligible voters in Alabama's third congressional district are Latino.

That data come from the latest report from the Pew Research Center, which has determined that a record 27.3 million Latinos in the United States will be eligible to vote in this year's presidential election.

Alabama's 1.8 percent share of eligible voters who are Latino ranks 46th nationally, which isn't a surprise. No. 1 is New Mexico, where 40.4 percent of that state's eligible voters are Latino. No. 2 is Texas.

The clickable Pew map of states and congressional districts is a great way to explore the country and its growing Latino population.

I began my life as an independent member of the family before I was old enough to vote. At the age of 17, I had my parents sign so that I could join the United States Air Force and did a 4-year tour of duty.

When I reached the age of 18 there was no formal way to recognize that my obligations as a citizen had changed. Besides, I was deployed abroad and one does not think very much about these type of things at such a young age and removed from the day-to-day life.

Later in life, I came to understand that no matter where you are, youth overlooks the importance of community involvement and what happens at the ballot box. This is precisely the reason that I bring up the subject.

Our young people in particular need to get beyond the normal reticence to engage in our civic duty, because now more than at any time in our history, we need to act on our convictions and know that every one of our votes count. Also, Latinos are on the leading edge of an epic effort to make a difference in electing our national political leaders.

An example of this is the fact that there are 10 states where the Latino community is portrayed as a demographically rich area. This affects the national count within 54 electoral votes of determining who will be president of the United States. And this represents only the beginning of a growing influence nationwide that bodes well for a powerful political future.

The Constitution dictates that the results at the ballot box be translated into 538 “electors” that act on behalf of those that voted for president and vice president. The number of electors is the same as the number in the Congressional delegations from the states that together add up to 535 plus 3 electors allocated to the District of Columbia.

To win an election for president and vice president, candidates must receive the majority of the 538 electoral votes that is set at 270 or higher. When we look at the electoral map that reflects this distribution, the Latino community comes into prominence.

Latinos have a determining political presence in 10 states that together represent 216 of the 270 electoral votes needed to elect a president and vice president. Arizona, 11 electoral votes, California 55, Colorado 9, Florida 29, Illinois 20, New Jersey 14, New Mexico 5, Nevada 6, New York 29 and Texas, 38 takes us a long way in deciding an election at a national level.

In these same ten states, the Latino population portion ranges from 17 percent in Illinois to 48 percent in new Mexico and thus has the leverage to be a determining factor in deciding who gets elected. However, this leverage cannot be exercised if Latinos do not vote.

The present political climate demands that we decide on two distinct visions for the future of the United States. Both of these visions will profoundly affect the destiny of the Latino community.

The required decision also stand to determine the evolving characteristics of our major political parties and the discourse they bring to the table. So, let us go vote our conscience and our interests because if we do not, we must understand that making a choice not to vote is also making a choice for the worse.

On Labor Day there was a good Puerto Rican party on Hollywood Beach – classic Willie Colón salsa music playing on the boom box – hosted by a South Florida group called Boricuas Realengos.

Boricua means Puerto Rican, and so the group’s name translates to “Far-Flung Puerto Ricans.”

Boricuas Realengos started just two years ago – but it already has 4,000 members. That’s because one of its missions is to help Puerto Ricans migrating to the U.S. mainland from their Caribbean island, which is a U.S. commonwealth.

“The situation is very bad in Puerto Rico,” says Angie Flores, a Boricuas Realengos director and an industrial engineer in Miramar who left Puerto Rico 21 years ago.

“It’s very hard to live there. So we want people from Puerto Rico to feel that family touch here and tell them, you know, how the system works.”

That emergent "family touch" is helping newcomers like Norah Rodriguez more easily network job opportunities – like the math teacher position she found at Palm Beach Lakes Community High School soon after she arrived last year from Arroyo, Puerto Rico.

“Neither my husband nor I would have moved here if we didn’t have that kind of support,” says Rodriguez.

And that includes comfort food.

When Rodriguez moved to Lake Worth, so did The PR Bakery By Diana. It has her favorites, like mofongo, a fried plantain dish; quesitos, sweet cheese pastries, and mucho más.

“I was really surprised to know that so many Puerto Ricans are now staying here in southern Florida.”

She’s not the only one surprised.

One of the worst economic crises in Puerto Rico’s history is driving tens of thousands of people from the island each year. All of them are U.S. citizens – and most are coming to Florida. The state’s Puerto Rican population has grown 110 percent since 2000 to more than a million.

The majority live in Central Florida locales like Orlando. But what’s less known is that South Florida is experiencing this Boricua Boom too. More than 300,000 Puerto Ricans now live in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach Counties.

“South Florida – the culture is a lot more like Puerto Rico,” says Forth Lauderdale software engineer Carlos Hernandez, one of the Boricuas Realengos at the Hollywood Beach fiesta.

“It’s got more of a Latin way of life,” says Hernandez, who’s originally from Puerto Rico’s capital, San Juan, as he plays a güiro, a rhythm instrument made from a gourd.

That cultural factor is one reason Puerto Rican business is following Puerto Ricans into South Florida more than elsewhere in the state. National Lumber and Hardware is Puerto Rico’s largest home improvement chain, and it opened its first U.S. store last year in Lake Worth.

DOCTOR EXODUS

“It’s refreshing that I could go out and find a lot of the things I found in Puerto Rico,” says E.R. doctor Brian Mendez, who recently moved from Bayamón, Puerto Rico, to Miramar – which along with Pembroke Pines may be South Florida’s Puerto Rican epicenter.

Mendez loves the fact that he can now walk into WalMart there and buy Puerto Rico’s most popular bread, Cidrines, or its best-selling coffee, Yaucono.

But what matters most to Mendez is that he can practice medicine at a higher level here – and at a much higher salary. In Puerto Rico, the crisis is forcing many hospitals and clinics to close. At least one doctor is leaving the island each day.

“Yeah, I feel sad,” says Mendez. “We’re in a big hole in Puerto Rico, and we need to do something about it.”

Until its dysfunctional political parties get their acts together, Puerto Rico will keep losing professionals like Mendez. And those who follow Puerto Rican migration say that while many working-class arrivals find theme park jobs in Orlando, nurses, engineers and entrepreneurs are gravitating to South Florida.

“In South Florida, you get more opportunities for professionals,” says Benjamin Caban, who heads the Puerto Rican Professional Association of South Florida (PROFESA). “We’ve seen that more and more Puerto Rican professionals are coming to South Florida.”

Because Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, Caban says they often have an easier time establishing themselves here – and building professional bridges.

“Definitely I think the Puerto Ricans, any place you put them they could get along with everyone,” Caban says. “We could definitely connect different dots.”

Caban says Puerto Rico’s crisis is South Florida’s gain in that sense. He thinks Puerto Ricans are poised to become a Latino force here on par with Cubans. But that will take more growth – and unity.

Says Flores of Boricuas Realengos: “We want to have the Puerto Rican community to stay together – the same way that the Cubans do.”

Earlier this year, Dr. Joaquin Arambula, an emergency room physician from Selma, became the first Latino physician to serve in the State Assembly after being elected to represent the state’s 31st District — a central California agricultural region where the population is nearly 70 percent Latino.

Arambula said he ran for office partly because of the rapidly growing influx of Spanish-speaking patients in his emergency department. He sought reinforcements, “but there aren’t enough doctors with the cultural competency and understanding of the Latino community” to serve this growing population, Arambula said.

“This is something that needs to change,” he said.

Arambula and members of the Latino Physicians of California, a professional group that seeks to boost the number of Latino doctors in the state, spoke to reporters Friday about the need for more representation of Latinos in the medical field.

Latinos make up about 40 percent of the population in California — outnumbering any other ethnic-racial group, and they’re expected to constitute a majority of the state’s population by 2050. But only about 5 percent of all physicians in the state are Latino, according to the California Health Care Foundation. (California Healthline is an editorially independent publication of the California Health Care Foundation.) Latinos also represent 8 percent of nurses and about 4 percent of pharmacists, the group of physicians noted.

Adding to the need, more than one-third of Latino physicians plan to retire within the next 10 years, according to a new survey of the LPOC’s physician members.

This is especially pressing when Latinos make up a small percentage of students graduating from medical schools, said Dr. Jose Arevalo, chair of the Latino physicians group.

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, 7 percent of medical school graduates in California identified as Latino in 2015.

“If we are going to properly serve our current and future patient base, we must begin to develop a true pipeline to bring in Latino physicians and health professionals to meet this growing need,” Arevalo said.

Arevalo and colleagues also pointed to a 2015 UCLA national study that showed a decline in the number of Latino physicians. In 1980, for example, there were an estimated 135 Latino doctors for every 100,000 Latinos in the U.S. By 2010, that ratio dropped to 105 per every 100,000.

Silvia Diego, a family doctor in Modesto, said Latino doctors simply are better equipped to serve the needs of Latino patients. Understanding the language and culture results in better health outcomes, she said.

“Latinos are very family-centric, we take care of our old, we learn traditional home remedies,” Diego said. “It’s difficult to establish a patient-doctor relationship if [doctors] don’t understand or dismiss cultural values.”

Interpreters can help patients understand doctors’ orders, Diego said, but that doesn’t help close gaps in patient-doctor relationships.

“And then we wonder,” she added, “why there are large health disparities among Latinos.”

She and her colleagues agreed: Most Latino patients, especially those who only speak Spanish, will seek the Latino doctors in their communities.

“But the few of us cannot take the many of them,” she said.

The problem is exacerbated in areas, such as the Central Valley, where the Latino population is known to struggle with chronic conditions, such as diabetes and obesity.

But the passage of the Medical DREAMER Opportunity Act in California may help more Latinos become doctors. The legislation, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in September, allows students without papers pursuing medical professions to apply for state scholarships and loan forgiveness programs. The law goes into effect next year.

Medical education is expensive but is even more so for students in the country illegally because they are barred from receiving federal financial aid.

Dr. Catherine Lucey, vice dean for education at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, said there are not enough scholarship opportunities for medical students in general. “Students are daunted with anticipated debt,” Lucey said, “and this does influence career decisions.”

This may be an even greater concern for first-generation students, who often are responsible for supporting their families financially.

UCSF’s School of Medicine, Lucey said, is pushing to diversify its student body with the help of pipeline medical education programs as well as through a more holistic approach to admissions. This encompasses taking into account more than just test scores but also the ability to communicate in a second language and a student’s environment. Currently Latinos make up about 20 percent of UCSF’s medical students, Lucey said.

Oftentimes, it seems the word “Hispanic” translates into “his panic.” In the words of comedian George Lopez, “Who is panicking? And more so, why is anyone panicking because of me?”

The general stigma of our beautiful cultural roots is laden with hatred toward us stemming from politicians on soap boxes professing the betterment of America and movies and TV shows depicting us in roles as maids, gardeners and even criminals. We don’t all speak in broken English, nor are we limited to those occupations. Widely misunderstood and often stereotyped, we are often cast aside as if any of the generalizations were true, thus making acceptance that much more difficult.

In a world with so much information readily available, ignorance is a choice. As a whole, we must abstain from generalizing an entire population simply because of its color, creed or occupation. Not all Latinos are any of the above, just like we’re not all Mexicans. In years past, Puerto Rican people often were asked for their green cards at PennDOT when they went to transfer their driver’s licenses. If that’s not ignorance, I don’t know what is. Most others outside this region know that Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, a commonwealth just like Pennsylvania.

Ignorance like this makes me wonder what actually has been taught in local schools. We know that the history of Scranton includes coal mines and railroads and it is totally understandable and commendable to learn about this history. However, national and world history also are necessary. Education is the key to eradicating ignorance. If our kids are our future, what future would we have if they are not well-prepared to compete with the rest of the world?

It was sad to see that most locals have had many misconceptions about Latinos. Bringing awareness to this issue became necessary and the inception of the annual Scranton Latin Festival was based precisely on that note. Its mission was to educate the masses on the 20 different Latino countries. Its goal has been to showcase as many of the Latino countries as possible in an effort to show the distinctions and similarities of each. We all speak Spanish and yet we are different. We have slight deviations in our dialects but we manage to understand one another quite well.

Another misconception by non-Latinos is that when someone speaks Spanish, it’s because they are speaking about non-Spanish speakers nearby. While I will agree that it may be awkward at times and people may feel excluded when it occurs, rest assured that the conversation likely is not about you. For example, think about your last visit to a Chinese buffet. Do you think that the waitresses there speak to one another in their language about you and how many servings you’ve had? Does it stop you from dining there? Do you take offense to their language? I think it’s safe to say that the average person could care less and assumes that it’s likely that the person cannot speak English. It is not intended to isolate anyone purposely, since we are all trying to gain acceptance in this harsh, misdirected world in which Latinos are seemingly among the primary targets.

Separately, we have our own traditions, beliefs and culture but have learned to extend patience to those who do not understand us. For example, it’s not uncommon in our culture to discipline our children when they step out of line. Every Latino knows what a “chancleta” (slipper) is. Latina mothers often use a slipper to whack their ill-behaved child on their little bottoms. In our culture, it’s totally acceptable, whereas others may disagree. We teach manners and respect as well as practical life skills like cooking, cleaning and budgeting. We love deeply and care about others, with family being first, of course. We are eager to lend a helping hand to anyone and for the most part, we are friendly. Try saying “hola” (hello) to a Spanish-speaking person and see the response. The attempt alone at connecting with us is huge. It signifies acceptance in an often hateful world.

I’m happy to report that Scranton has progressed in terms of embracing, accepting and tolerating its booming Latino population. More Latino businesses are opening and are well-received by Scranton natives. The latest additions are Puerto Rican “lechoneras” (fire pit roasted pork) in South Side, a Caribbean food truck in West Scranton and an international deli on Cedar Avenue. All of them boast delicious food. If we’re not known for anything else, trust and believe that our food is finger-licking good.

To dispel another misconception, Caribbean food is not all spicy.

I urge people to have patience, to be open-minded, to learn to love our fellow adversaries and to strive for unity. After all, we all belong to the same race . . . human.